Updated Schedule 11/29

This is our updated schedule for the remaining of our project:

http://bit.ly/1Uae0J

Everything is going well and we look forward to this week as we have a lot of the manufacturing process remaining.

Building MCM

This past week we began work on our most critical module. Friday, 11/20, we had to show three parts to our GSI. These parts were manufactured using methods such as drilling, grinding, welding, and cutting. The few pieces we had made along with others we are working will be assembled to make our most critical module.
Our most critical module is the arm and the extension mechanism to lower down into the arena. During the manufacturing process, a guide arm and sliding arm were cut to length. Using tig welding, the guide nuts were attached to the arm mechanism. We had to purchase a plastic tube from Home Depot to use as a guide for the threaded rod, which cost about $1.38.
The assembly for our most critical module will be coupled with a motor. The entire casing for the gears at the top of the arena will be made to be able to rotate about an axis for our other module.

We are all very excited about putting our plan into action. We can see it coming together. Ahead there will be challenges, for example the design of the rotation mechanism, but this excites us. We are learning so much from the design and manufacturing process and have had to make continuous adjustments. I'm glad we are through the dry stuff in the class and got to move on to hands-on work.

This week was fun for us because it was a chance to get some hands-on assembly and analysis done with the motor lab. It took longer than expected, but we had a good time doing it and learned some things from it as well. We found it rewarding to finally have an assembled part sitting in front of us that is going to be part of our machine.

This week will be stressful for us, as well as all of the other groups I'm sure, because we will have to get into the shop and do some manufacturing. We spent some time this week tweaking some of our pieces and finalizing the drawings so that we will be ready to get our work done in the shop. We are very excited to get in and start machining some parts, and to see them come together into a working machine!

I'm including some of the diagrams we used in the analysis of our machine. We modeled our arm as a simple cantilevered beam, with a load equaling the weight of all of the balls in the arena acting at the end.

HW 5 Progress

Today we began working on Homework 5, which is the motor lab. In lab today, we were able to put the the gearbox together to its 25:1 configuration, and will continue working Tuesday, Nov. 10th to complete more of the assignment. Accompanied are a few pictures from the day.

Milestone 6 went well. The group all came together and did our part to get ready to manufacture our most critical module: arm.
The analysis was similar to the analysis done in the design review. Modifications were made and the arm dimensions were re-evaluated. Bill of parts and manufacturing process was put together in table form. The arm itself was designed on solidworks and engineering drawings were made from it, which will be posted later.